You are using an outdated and unsupported browser, please upgrade to get the best experience.

Menu

Committee

CHAIR OF THE COMMITTEE & CONFERENCE

Professor David V Ford

Chair of the International Population Data Linkage Conference 2016 & Professor of Health Informatics

Swansea University Medical School
Wales, UK

David is Director of the Administrative Data Research Centre (ADRC) Wales, an £8million investment by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of its Big Data initiative and is Deputy Director of The Farr Institute funded by a consortium of top UK research funders led by the Medical Research Council (MRC).

David is the lead of the SAIL Databank, an internationally recognised data linkage resource formed from a wide variety of routinely collected data from across Wales.

David is Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA) and past Chairman and current Director of MediWales, a membership organisation representing the medical technology sector of Wales. David has received research grants and consultancy contracts valuing over £40million.

International Scientific Committee

Athanasios Anastasiou

Swansea University Medical School

UK

Professor Marcos Ennes Barreto

Federal University of Bahia

Brazil

Professor Chris Dibben

Administrative Data Research Centre Scotland

UK

Professor Mika Gissler

National Institute for Health and Welfare

Finland

Dr Catharine Goddard

Farr Institute Network

UK

Dr Zisis Kozlakidis

University College London

UK

Professor David Martin

Administrative Data Research Centre England

UK

Associate Professor Kimberlyn McGrail

University of British Columbia

Canada

Associate Professor Rebecca Mitchell

Australian Institute of Health Innovation

Australia

Dr Goran Nenadic

University of Manchester

UK

Dr Dermot O’Reilly

Administrative Data Research Centre Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland

Professor Sallie Pearson

The University of New South Wales

Australia

Michael Schull MSc, MD, FRCPC

University of Toronto

Canada

Professor Tjeerd van Staa

University of Manchester

UK

In collaboration with

Hosted by

About the International Population Data Linkage Network

This conference is bi-annually hosted by the current Director of the International Population Data Linkage Network (IPDLN). The IPDLN facilitates communications between centres that specialise in data linkage and users of the linked data.

Contact Information

Get In Touch

Stay Up To Date

If you'd like us to keep you posted on key dates and announcements, simply send us your email address:

Please wait

Athanasios Anastasiou

Lecturer In Health Data Science

Swansea University Medical School
UK

Athanasios Anastasiou received his BEng in Biomedical Engineering from the Technological Education Institute of Athens – Greece in 2002 and his MRes in Communications Engineering and Signal Processing from the University of Plymouth – UK in 2004. His professional experience includes software development with a special interest in the medical domain and digital signal processing. He is currently lecturer in Health Data Science at Swansea University's School of Medicine.

Professor Marcos Ennes Barreto

Assistant Professor

Federal University of Bahia
Salvador, Brazil

Marcos Ennes Barreto was born in 1974 in Curitiba, state of Paraná, Brazil. He did his high school at the Military School of Porto Alegre, state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. In 1992, he entered in the Lutheran University of Brazil (ULBRA), where he got a B.Sc. degree in Informatics, in 1997. He obtained a M.Sc. and a Ph.D in Computer Science, respectively in 2000 and 2010, from the Graduate Program in Computer Science (PPGC) of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), which is considered by the Ministry of Education as one of the top-five graduate programs in Computer Science in Brazil. In 2000, he was a visiting fellowship at the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble (LIG), France, from May to November. In 2002, he was also a visiting professor at Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, Spain, from September to December. Since 2010, he is an assistant professor at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), in Salvador, Brazil, and researcher at the Distributed Systems Laboratory (LaSiD). He conducts research projects focusing on parallel and distributed systems, cloud computing and robotics, tools and algorithms applied to big data applications, specially in Bioinformatics and Public Health domains.

Professor Chris Dibben

Director

Administrative Data Research Centre Scotland
UK

Chris is Director of the Longitudinal Studies Centre Scotland. He is also Director of the Administrative Data Liaison Service and ADRC (Scotland).

Chris has worked on, amongst other subjects, epidemiological studies into recovery after heart attacks, the causes of Low Birth Weight, the survival of drug misusers and the impact of air pollution. He also contributed to work on the UK NHS health funding formula and on measuring health inequalities, for example developing the Health Poverty Index for the Department of Health and Information Centre (NHS). Other work includes the development of national deprivation indices across the UK and in South Africa and evaluations of government area based initiatives. Finally he is interested in the vulnerability of communities to ‘natural hazards’.

Professor Mika Gissler

Professor

National Institute for Health and Welfare
Helsinki, Finland

Mika Gissler has a Master degree in Economics and Statistics (University of Helsinki) and Doctor of Philosophy degree in Epidemiology (University of Tampere). He holds professorships and faculty appointments at the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Helsinki, Finland, the University of Turku, Finland, the University of Oulu, Finland, and the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. Professor Gissler’s main research focus has been in utilization of routinely collected health and welfare registers. He has experience on using registers in all Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland), and in several European countries (e.g. Germany and Estonia).Professor Gissler’s main research interests include perinatal and infant health, childhood and adolescent health, sexual and reproductive health, mental health, migrant health and the use of health care services. Increasingly, the studies have included a longitudinal component, usually from the prenatal period until adulthood. The largest ongoing study has been the 1987 Finnish Birth Cohort with data on more than 60 000 children, which have been followed-up through various registers and data linkages. The study has now received funding for more than ten years until 2018.

Dr Catharine Goddard

Manager

Farr Institute Network
UK

Catharine is Manager of the Farr Institute UK Network with responsibility for facilitating and implementing interactions across the Farr Institute and between the Farr Institute and the wider UK health informatics research community. Catharine works closely with each of the Farr Institute Centres and the leads of the eight UK Network working groups to ensure effective coordination of activities to meet our strategic objectives.

Catharine has extensive experience of managing academic-NHS-industry networks. From 2010-2014 Catharine was programme manager for the Kuwait-Scotland eHealth Innovation Network (KSeHIN). From 2006-2010 Catharine led biomarker research for diabetes and cardiovascular disease within the Translational Medicine Research Collaboration between Pfizer, the Scottish Universities and NHS. Catharine started her research career at the University of Cambridge where she specialised in using genetically modified mice to further understand the molecular and cellular lesions underlying human diseases, including cardiac arrhythmias and Cystic Fibrosis.

Dr Zisis Kozlakidis

Researcher

University College London
UK

Dr Zisis Kozlakidis is a virologist, with a PhD in microbiology from Imperial College London followed by working experience in the design of viral diagnostics. His expertise in viral co-infections, diagnostics and characterisation of novel RNA viral species was acknowledged by being elected fellow of the Linnean Society. Additionally the viral genomic analyses provide evidence for the transmission and development of resistance within viral species, through the emergence of viral recombinants and the associated implications to public health.

Zisis has significant expertise in the archival preservation of viral species and biobanking. He currently serves as the co-chair of the International Society of Biological and Environmental repositories (ISBER) and has provided operating feasibility advice on such facilities in a number of different countries including Germany, the US and China. His involvement in biobanking, clinical data linkage to banked material, ethics and public engagement were been central in being awarded the Associateship of King’s College London.

His current work at UCL /UCLH involves the development and integration of next generation sequencing practices in routine healthcare. The routine linkage of this data to clinical records is expected to inform infection control practices and their associated financial impact(s).

Professor David Martin

Deputy Director

Administrative Data Research Centre England
UK

David is Deputy Director of the Economic and Social Research Council-funded Administrative Data Research Centre for England, and Co-Director of both the UK Data Service and National Centre for Research Methods. He is a past director of the ESRC Census Programme, and a member of ESRC Council. He has worked extensively on geographical data linkage and analysis, beginning in the mid-1980s with early use of geographical information systems for analysis of health care access and property taxation. He has advised the Office for National Statistics and other statistical agencies extensively on addressing and zone design issues, and originated the systems of geographical areas used for the 2001 and 2011 censuses and Neighbourhood Statistics in England and Wales. His current interests include a particular focus on 24-hour population estimation for small areas and the development of better socioeconomic data on workplaces and daytime populations.

Dr Kimberlyn McGrail

Associate Professor

University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada

Kimberlyn McGrail, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, associate director of the UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research, an associate with the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation, and a board member and scientific advisor for Population Data BC. Kim’s current research interests are in evaluation of health system policy interventions, aging and the use and cost of health care services, and governance of access to data for research purposes. Her research is conducted in collaboration with policy and decision makers, including, including the BC Ministry of Health, BC’s Health Authorities, Canada Health Infoway, the Health Council of Canada and the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Kim was the 2009-10 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Associate in Health Care Policy and Practice. She holds a PhD in Health Care and Epidemiology from the University of British Columbia, and a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Michigan.

Rebecca Mitchell

Associate Professor

Australian Institute of Health Innovation
Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia

Rebecca Mitchell is an Associate Professor at the Australian Institute of Health Innovation at Macquarie University. She is a psychologist and injury epidemiologist and her research focuses on the conduct of large-scale injury epidemiological research to guide improvements in health service delivery and health policy.

A/Prof Mitchell has extensive experience in analysing large datasets and linked data collections to investigate injury and health outcomes. She has led and been involved in research studies that have examined paediatric trauma, patient safety, fall injury, hip fractures, dementia and injury, work-related injury, water safety and road safety.

Currently, A/Prof Mitchell is leading several studies that involve population-based record linkage, including an examination of transitions in health care between the home and residential aged care for older individuals with dementia who are injured, an examination of unwarranted clinical variation following hospitalised injury among young people, and a case-control study examining injury, health care use and mortality of individuals 18+ years in Australia to quantify the extent to which health outcomes can be attributed to injury.

Dermot O’Reilly

Senior Clinical Lecturer

Dr Dermot O’Reilly is a Senior Clinical Lecturer with the Centre for Public Health at Queen’s University Belfast with an interest in social epidemiology. He is the Director of the Administrative Data Research Centre in Northern Ireland (ADRC-NI), one of four such centres recently created to facilitate access to, and linkage of, administrative in the UK. He also helped establish the Census-based Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study (NILS) and is Operational Director of NICOLA the Northern Ireland Cohort for the Longitudinal Study of Ageing.

Sallie Pearson

Professor

Head of Medicines Policy Research Unit
Centre for Big Data Research in Health
Faculty of Medicine
The University of New South Wales, Australia

Sallie is a health service researcher and behavioural scientist with almost 20 years’ experience in quality use of medicines research. Sallie completed her doctoral training at the University of Newcastle, Australia (1998) and her Postdoctoral Fellowship in Pharmaceutical Policy at Harvard Medical School, USA (2000-2001). Sallie established her independent research group in 2006 and now Heads the Medicines Policy Research Unit at the newly established Centre for Big Data Research in Health, Faculty of Medicine University of New South Wales. Sallie is also the Scientific Director of the Centre of Research Excellence in Medicines and Ageing, a Cancer Institute NSW Career Development Fellow and an Australian Health Policy Research Fellow.

In 2015, Sallie received the Premier’s Award for Outstanding Cancer Research. Sallie is also actively involved in a number of Australian pharmaceutical policy and health data linkage committees and advisory groups including the Drug Utilisation Sub-Committee of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, Commonwealth Department of Human Services Research Advisory Committee; NSW Population and Health Service Research Ethics Committee (Chair) and NSW Ministry of Health Ethics and Data Linkage Working (Chair).

Michael Schull MSc, MD, FRCPC

President, CEO and Senior Scientist

Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences
Professor in the Department of Medicine
University of Toronto, Canada

Dr. Schull is President, CEO and Senior Scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, and Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on health service utilization, quality of care, patient outcomes, and the evaluation of health policy as they relate to emergency care and health system integration. His studies use administrative health datasets and linkages with clinical data, and he works closely with health system decision-makers. Dr. Schull practices as an Emergency Medicine specialist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto.

Dr Goran Nenadic

Reader

School of Computer Science
University of Manchester, UK

Dr Goran Nenadic is a Reader in the School of Computer Science, the University of Manchester. His team is also part of The Farr Institute’s Health eResearch Centre (HeRC), where he co-ordinates healthcare text analytics efforts in collaboration with a number of local hospitals and charities. His current research focus is on large-scale extraction and linking of clinical/epidemiological findings from electronic health records (EHRs), healthcare social media and biomedical literature. His team has worked on mining narratives from EHRs (e.g. for clinical outcomes in cancer patients, or medication prescription extraction), making sense of patient-generated data from social media (e.g. benefits and harms of medical treatments) and providing context to clinical decision support systems (e.g. for treatment planning in brain injuries). He has led a number of joint projects with healthcare service providers (e.g. semi-automated large-scale anonymisation of clinical narratives; identification of mental health symptoms in social media; process mapping of occupational therapy reports), as well as with industrial partners (e.g. dynamic clinical documentation management (with Siemens), information extraction from clinical trial reports (with AstraZeneca)). Since 2008, his team has been actively involved in international challenges in clinical text mining. Goran Nenadic is the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Biomedical Semantics.

Professor Tjeerd van Staa

Professor of Health eResearch

University of Manchester, UK

Tjeerd van Staa studied medicine and received his degree in 1987 at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In May 2013, he became Professor of Health eResearch at the Health eResearch Centre (HeRC) / Farr Institute of Manchester University. One of the research themes within HeRC is Efficient Trials, which aims to harness advanced health informatics and electronic health record (EHR) data to improve the design and conduct of clinical trials. van Staa has been leading the development of simple pragmatic trials that use routinely collected data (as outlined in a recent article in the British Medical Journal). He has published over 180 peer-reviewed articles and is a well-recognised speaker in the field of pragmatic trials and pharmacoepidemiology. He has also experience in the implementation of several cluster trials and a large pharmacogenetic study within an EHR database.

Mauricio L. Barreto

Senior-Scientist & Professor of Epidemiology

Mauricio L. Barreto MD, MPH and a PhD is a Brazilian epidemiologist. His research interests includes the social and environmental determinants of infectious diseases, allergy and asthma and the evaluation of the impact of large social and health interventions on population health. He has coordinated large research projects, including the “100 million Brazilian cohort” focused on the study of the social protection policies on health and other outcomes (education, work etc.). This project creates great challenges on assembling, linkage, processing, analysis and governance of administrative data in the Brazilian context. Mauricio has participated in several scientific and health policies advisory boards and he has published over 360 peer-reviewed scientific papers in international journals. He is an Honorary Senior Researcher of the National Research Council-Brazil (CNPq), fellow of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and The World Academy of Sciences(TWAS), Honorary Professor at the LSHTM-UK, Editorial consultant of the Lancet and up to February 2011 Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Peter Christen

Professor

Research School of Computer Science
Australian National University, Australia

Peter Christen is a Professor at the Research School of Computer Science at
the Australian National University. Before moving to Australia, he received
his Diploma in Computer Science Engineering from ETH Zurich in 1995 and his
PhD in Computer Science from the University of Basel in 1999.

His research interests are in data mining and data linkage, with a special
focus on privacy-preserving techniques and computational challenges of
data linkage. He has published over 130 articles in these areas, including
in 2012 the book “Data Matching” published by Springer. He is the principle
developer of the Febrl (Freely Extensible Biomedical Record Linkage) open
source data cleaning, de-duplication and data linkage system.

Adalsteinn D. Brown

Director

Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation
University of Toronto, Canada

Adalsteinn (Steini) Brown is the Director of the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and is also the Dalla Lana Chair in Public Health Policy and the Head of the Division of Public Health Policy at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. He is a Scientist in the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital. Past roles include the Assistant Deputy Minister for Strategy and Policy at the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care and for Science and Research at the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Kári Stefánsson

President, Chairman, CEO and Co-founder

deCODE Genetics
Iceland

Kári Stefánsson, M.D., Dr. Med. has served as President, Chief Executive Officer and a Director since he founded deCODE genetics in August 1996. Dr. Stefánsson was appointed the Chairman of the Board of Directors of deCODE genetics in December 1999. From 1993 until April 1997, Dr. Stefánsson was a professor of Neurology, Neuropathology and Neuroscience at Harvard University. From 1983 to 1993, he held faculty positions in Neurology, Neuropathology and Neurosciences at the University of Chicago. Dr. Stefánsson received his M.D. and Dr. Med. from the University of Iceland and is board-certified in neurology and neuropathology in the United States. He has published numerous articles on the genetics of common/complex diseases and has been among the leaders of the world in the discovery of variants in the sequence of the human genome that associate with the risk of common/complex traits. Dr. Stefánsson was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential men of the year for 2007 and by Newsweek as one of the 10 most important biologists of the 21 century. He was the recipient of the Jakobus Award 2007, The World Glaucoma Association Award for present scientific impact 2007, The European Society of Human Genetics Award 2009, and The Andre Jahre Award 2009.

Gun Peggy Knudsen

Executive Director

Gun Peggy Knudsen is a geneticist with a PhD in epigenetics. She is Executive Director of the divison for Health Data and Digitalisation at NIPH. The division has expertise in the research and management of health registries, population health studies, biobanks and IT/e-health/digitalisation. The division conducts registry-based research and health analysis, as well as genetic and other research related to biobank material. The division also has expertise in bioinformatics. She is responsible for co-ordinating health registries, IT / e-health and health studies / biobank across the institute. She has extensive experience in adminstrating research projects, both epidemiological and genetics projects, and has in depth knowledge of the cohort data, the biological material and previous and ongoing genetics projects based on material at NIPH.

Christine M. O’Keefe

Senior Principal Research Scientist

CSIRO Data61
Australia

Christine is a Senior Principal Research Scientist in CSIRO Data61, and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Adelaide. She is a Fellow of the Australian Mathematical Society and the Institute for Combinatorics and its Applications. Prior to joining CSIRO in 2000, Christine held academic positions at Adelaide University and the University of Western Australia.

The University of Adelaide awarded Christine a BSc with Honours in Pure Mathematics in 1982 and a PhD in Pure Mathematics in 1988. She also gained an MBA from the Australian National University in 2008. Christine was awarded the Australian Mathematical Society Medal 2000 for distinguished research in the Mathematical Sciences and the Hall Medal of the Institute for Combinatorics and its Applications 1996 for outstanding contributions to the field. She was included on the National Pioneer Womens’ Hall of Fame Signature Quilt, A Patchwork of Empowerment.

Ronan Lyons

Director

The Farr Institute of Health Informatics Research
Swansea University, UK

Ronan is Professor of Public Health at Swansea University, Honorary Consultant in Public Health with Public Health Wales NHS Trust and an adjunct professor at Monash University, Australia.

He is Director of the Farr Institute Centre for Improvement of Population Health through E-records Research (CIPHER), Director of the National Centre for Population Health and Wellbeing Research, Co-Director of the DECIPHer UK Public Health Research Centre of Excellence and Co-Director of the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) databank, the national privacy protecting research infrastructure for Wales. The focus of Ronan’s research is the use of routine data in cohorts, trials and in the evaluation of natural experiments and complex interventions. He led the development of the total population Wales Electronic Cohort for Children as a platform for the evaluation of interventions and policies. He is also involved in linking data to support a number of UK cohorts and cross cohort initiatives, including leading on the development of the analysis platform for the MRC's Dementias Research Platform UK that will bring together data from 33 cohorts, utilising the UK Secure eResearch Platform (UKSeRP).

Ronan has a particular interest in the neglected field of injury prevention and control. He is involved in many of the world's largest observational, interventional and policy relevant injury research studies and chairs the International Collaborative Effort on Injury Statistics and Methods www.cdc.gov/nchs/injury/advice.htm.

Ronan is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and a trustee of the charity Play Wales.

Linking Infectious Disease Laboratory Data for Research

Laboratory data on infectious diseases are collected routinely in many countries for clinical management and public health surveillance. By linking these data to perinatal, primary or secondary care databases, it is possible to associate specific pathogens with clinical information and outcomes, creating great opportunities for research. In this workshop, you will learn about past research successes using linked laboratory data on infections, and outline the methodological, ethical and resource challenges that may arise and how they have been overcome. We will also discuss the opportunities and challenges in using these linked databases for international comparisons of public health policy (for example, vaccination programmes).

For enquires about the workshop, please contact the Workshop Coordinator:Dr Pia HardelidUCL Institute of Child Health, University of London p.hardelid@ucl.ac.uk

Learning Health Systems: the only way to do translational bioinformatics?

Tuesday 23 August, 11:00 to 12:30 School of Management, Room 111, First Floor

Learning health systems(LHS) coordinate, integrate and feedback between research, teaching and healthcare delivery; three areas which are interlinked in concept, but often divided in practice. Discussions of the translational potential of bioinformatics have under-emphasised quality improvement of healthcare. Linked electronic health records and progress in data science offer opportunities to implement LHS at scale. In this workshop, we will consider ways in which current models of linked data research could be used to directly influence healthcare in a LHS and develop specific examples of how such linked data can work in real-time to change patient care.

For enquires about the workshop, please contact the Workshop Coordinator:Dr Amitava BanerjeeFarr Institute of Health Informatics Research, University College London ami.banerjee@ucl.ac.uk

Reproducible Report Writing with R Studio

Reproducible Research is a method that allows for the direct linkage of documentation and code (e.g. statistics output) in one document, making it reproducible. In the past this technique required considerable programming knowledge, however due to markdown files automated reports can now be very easily produced.

Machine Learning

This workshop will discuss the problems inherent in large scale, complex and messy data. Suitable methodology to overcome these issues will be discussed, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of different machine learning approaches. This will then be followed by a practical example session on how to successfully overcome these issues.

An automated quality assessment, enables efficient comparisons of the quality of population-based administrative data in a single repository, and also facilitates between-repository comparisons for research across multiple jurisdictions. The Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (MCHP) and Ontario’s Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) house two of the largest and most complex data repositories in Canada. A data quality framework and a suite of SAS® tools for automation of this framework have been jointly developed by MCHP and ICES. The purpose of this workshop is to demonstrate the use of these data quality tools with a brief introduction to the framework and related concepts.

Much epidemiological and public health research relies wholly on coded data, and research EHRs are generally tempted to put use of free text in the “too difficult” box. This can be because free text is unavailable due to governance concerns about de-identification, or because the volume or complexity of free text is considered overwhelming. Either way, this means that health datasets have far more “missing” data than they need to.

The purpose of this workshop is:

to raise awareness of the benefits and challenges in using free text in EHR research

to help participants with issues they may have encountered in their own research

to help the Farr Institute develop and implement strategies to optimise the effective and properly governanced use of de-identified free text in public health research

to identify common issues in free text governance from different stakeholder perspectives and help participants scope the steps

For enquires about the workshop, please contact the Workshop Coordinator:Richard JacksonKings College London richard.r.jackson@kcl.ac.uk

Technical and Methodological Solutions to Maximise the Benefit of Linked Data

Linked data offers huge potential for research to improve the health and well-being of people world-wide. However, only a tiny fraction of this potential is being realized, in part due to limitations posed by technology and traditional methodological approaches. We seek to gather experts in the field to reflect on the questions “What are the technical and methodological barriers to maximizing the benefit of linked data?” and “How can these barriers be overcome?” Presentations on several specific topics will be followed by an open ended panel discussion in which panel members and workshop attendees can discuss problems and brainstorm solutions.

For enquires about the workshop, please contact the Workshop Coordinator:Dan ThayerSwansea University d.s.thayer@swansea.ac.uk